ENGLISH 110 - FIRST-YEAR WRITING
Michael McCamley
Professor
Office: 022 Memorial Hall
Meg McGuire
Associate Professor
Office: 315 Memorial Hall
ENGL110 - FIRST-YEAR WRITING
University Requirements
University Requirements must be completed by all students pursuing a University of Delaware undergraduate degree regardless of their college. ENGL110 is a University Requirement and requires completion of the course with a grade of C- or better, or an exemption. If a student earns a grade lower than C-, the seminar must be repeated for no additional degree credit.
ENGL110 - First-Year Writing
ENGL110 is a 3-credit seminar introduction to the process of academic writing that centers on the composition of analytical, research-based essays. Students in ENGL110 do much more than practice writing: They learn the expectations of college professors, hone their skills in project management, and engage in rigorous revision as they write in, and with, a community of university-level undergraduate peers. They are also introduced to the intellectual culture and academic habits necessary for success in a research-intensive university. For these reasons, ideally students should take ENGL 110 during their first semesters at UD.
Various sections of ENGL110 are offered each semester and in winter and summer sessions. ENGL110 classes are not over-enrolled, so that instructors may provide individual attention to all students.
Credit for ENGL110 cannot be gained from AP exams in English.
Dual or concurrent enrollment courses are eligible for ENGL110 exemption if they are taken on a college campus or with a college instructor.
Transfer students who have taken a writing course(s) at another college or university may be considered for ENGL 110 exemption. To review if your course is eligible for ENGL 110 transfer exemption, please visit UD’s Transfer Credit Matrix.
If students have taken a first-year writing/composition course(s) that is not in the UD Transfer Credit Matrix, please visit Transfer Course Evaluation to request re-evaluation of the credit for possible exemption.
Courses are not pre-approved for ENGL110 exemption. A course must have already been completed and transferred to a student's UD account before it will be reviewed for ENGL110 equivalency.
By the end of ENGL 110, students will be able to:
- Write for different audiences, in different genres, and in different contexts.
Effective writers employ rhetorical flexibility to adapt to different writing situations and demands.
- Write to address rhetorical exigences.
Effective writing does things in the world by identifying and addressing exigences. An exigence is the idea that a rhetorical situation arises when there is a problem or an issue that requires a response or action. It could be a problem we need to solve, a question we want to answer, or an idea we want to share. It's what motivates us to write, and it shapes the way we write and the message we convey.
- Read texts fairly and critically to determine their persuasiveness in different rhetorical situations.
Writers read sources fairly to understand sources’ ideas, aware of how their own viewpoints might affect their response to a source.
Writers read sources critically to determine how persuasive the sources’ arguments, claims, and evidence are to their intended audience.
- Incorporate others’ texts ethically and rhetorically into their own writing.
Ethical source use clearly delineates where other writers’ ideas begin and end.
Rhetorical source use shapes an audience’s response to sources by using textual cues (e.g., attributive or signal phrases, “quotation sandwiches,” as well as perceptive analysis, synthesis, and summary/paraphrase.)
- Write in different modes (alphanumerically, visually, aurally, digitally.)
Writing in the 21st century uses not only letters and numbers, but images, sounds, and other modes of communication. In addition, effective writing capitalizes on the affordances of both print and digital platforms.
ARAK Award
Mr. Sydney F. Arak and Ms. Ruth Toor, University of Delaware alumni, have provided funding to celebrate student writing. They established an award in honor of their parents, John and Frieda Arak.
Each year, more than 4,000 students enroll in English 110, our required first-year writing course. Students with source-based non-fiction projects, such as a research essay and/or a multimodal composition (any text that uses two or more modes such as text, images, video, and audio) assignments are encouraged to submit their texts for consideration for the Arak Award. A committee of ENGL 110 instructors reads the work of nominees and selects the winners. Students who receive the Arak Award have their texts published online in the Arak Journal, an annual anthology of student writing from the past year ENGL 110 class. Winners also receive a monetary prize.
Encouraging the diverse composition skills by the UD student body is vitally important. The Department of English is deeply grateful for the Arak family's ongoing support of our work in doing so.
Eligibility:
- Only current students of the University of Delaware are eligible to participate.
- Texts must be completed during and for the student's ENGL 110 class.
- Registered ENGL 110 students may submit one entry only.
Submissions must be received by January 11 of the year following the student's enrollment in ENGL 110, e.g. projects written during 2026 courses must be submitted by January 10, 2027.
Submission Instructions:
- Please submit via this form.
- All texts must have a title noted at the beginning of the text.
- The text should include a works cited page with a consistent format (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.)
- Projects can be submitted through this form.
- Submitting a text indicates a student's agreement that the text was composed for an ENGL 110 class at the University of Delaware and is entirely the student's own work. If the text receives a prize, the student gives the University Composition Program permission to publish the text in the Arak Journal. Editors of the anthology may ask that a student revise the text before publication. Editors also reserve the right to edit student texts. Winning the Arak Award and publication is contingent upon possible revision and satisfactory source checking by the Arak editorial staff.
- If a text is chosen as a finalist, editors will ask students for a "source packet." This packet consists of copies of all sources used in the text (printouts of articles, scans of book pages, etc). If a student is in doubt about what should be included in a source packet, he/she should ask an English instructor or the Associate Director of the Composition Program.
